Beatrice and Virgil by Yann Martel

Scholars have long debated the relationship of art to the Holocaust, a debate often referred to as "the limits of representation". Does the sheer scale of the Holocaust mean that attempts to turn it into art always risk trivialising it, reducing the horror to a story that can be read, put away and forgotten? Henry, the protagonist of Yann Martel's Beatrice and Virgil, the follow-up to his Booker-winning Life of Pi, is a writer who decides to challenge the fact that no "poetic license was taken with – or given to – the Holocaust", and represent its evil and suffering in a new way.

Beatrice and Virgil

by
Yann Martel

Henry bears a striking resemblance to his author: his second novel, a charming, poignant tale of the humanity of animals, was an unexpected success, bringing prizes and fame. For five years Henry has laboured on his next project, a "flip book" that combines Holocaust novel with essay, representing the catastrophe in, he believes, an original way. Henry's publishers deem the book catastrophic, and Henry staggers off into writer's block and self pity. He and his wife move to some interchangeable cosmopolitan city – where Henry amuses himself , playing the clarinet and acting in amateur theatricals.

One day Henry receives a package in the post, with a letter and Flaubert's tale "The Legend of Saint Julian Hospitator", a fable about a boy whose greatest pleasure is killing animals. If you don't know Flaubert's story, never fear: Martel devotes 15 pages to summarising and quoting long passages from it. He also explains that "hospitator" means host; at the book's end we learn that Henry's surname is L'Hôte. The package also includes part of a play about two characters named Beatrice and Virgil, standing in a road, by a tree, trading cryptic epigrams. Later they offer sophomoric philosophising about something they call the Horrors: "How can there be anything beautiful after what we've lived through? It's incomprehensible."

The letter writer lives in the same city as our prataganist and also happens to be calle Henry. He is a taxidermist and Beatrice, it transpires, is a stuffed donkey, Virgil a stuffed monkey on her back (see what he did there?); they are his "guide to hell". Martel helps readers struggling with all this literary virtuosity: "Hell? What hell? Henry wondered. But at least now he understood the connection to The Divine Comedy. Dante is guided through inferno and purgatory by Virgil and then through paradise by Beatrice."

Like the reader who needs help understanding Martel's allusions, Henry the taxidermist needs help writing his play, A 20th-Century Shirt (Beatrice and Virgil are living on a striped shirt – don't ask). Henry inexplicably agrees to assist. The result is a book by turns pretentious, humourless, tedious, and obvious. All the characters are there to be manipulated: Henry is endlessly blind to the evident, while the other characters are cardboard cutouts. Taxidermist Henry reads ersatz-Beckett out loud for pages at a time, or pontificates on the fate of animals.

Attempting to manage the problems he has created in trying to mix allegory, psychology, metafiction, mystery and a parable about the Holocaust (not to mention our inhumanity to animals) in under 200 pages, Martel also makes Henry explain the book's flaws: "There seemed to be essentially no action and no plot in it. Just two characters by a tree talking. It had worked with Beckett and Diderot. Mind you, those two were crafty and they packed a lot of action into the apparent inaction. But inaction wasn't working for the author of A 20th-Century Shirt." No kidding.

At the end, author Henry develops some "games", 12 questions posing moral quandaries: would you allow your son to endanger his life to try to save the rest of the family? If you knew people were about to be killed and you couldn't stop it, would you warn them? If only Martel had bothered to dramatise any of these dilemmas, he might have produced a novel that didn't show the limits of representation quite so painfully.

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